> Couldn't there be a change which would do the following:
>
> 1 - have a reference file which had "mappings", i.e.
> &egrave; = e
> &eacute; = e
> è = e
> 2 - whenever a single word like "polymères" was encountered,
> the word would be remapped into a new word using the
> mapping table, and then both words would be indexed,
> i.e. "polymères" and polymeres". Then when a person typed
> in "polymere" they would get a hit for "polymères"...

There is a similar problem when indexing a lot of PDF files with
an additional trick : the accentuated character codes are not the same
if the PDF file was generated on a Windows PC or on a Mac !

My solution : a little script (called in PDF.cc) which translates
the output of acroread with sed and a loooong list of commands when
indexing :

Here is the list of commands which did a fairly good job for PDF files
containing French accents generated on PC or Mac :